But the fact there had been no full-scale manual for use in the field up to this point is symptomatic of a larger negligence in the academic world. While there have been numerous studies proving the majority of information we convey to one another is done nonverbally, the importance of this revelation seems largely ignored by that world.

“I think the average psychotherapist or social worker goes through years and years of training,” says Chase. “And out of all of that, they get maybe a half hour on body language — and that’s a psychotherapist with a graduate degree. And then these are the same guys who are going out there producing studies that say [nonverbal communication makes up] two thirds or some odd number of communication — and then nothing changes in the academic perspective.”

Luckily, Chase and his team at Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories are trying to pick up the slack and expand that perspective. Currently, they’re focused on developing programs to pull the curtain back on how vulnerable the human brain is to ‘hacking’ and show (through profiling training) how vulnerable we — and the people around us — really are.

Chase hasn’t always been a model student (he tells us his parents would take him out to dinner when he’d pass a class with a C grade), but maybe it’s because nonverbal communication wasn’t a course he could pursue in school. But as soon as he found out about it, a whole, fascinating world he hadn’t known opened up to him.

“I was hooked,” says Chase. “It seemed like I was seeing…there’s something that’s been there all my life. All of this nonverbal communication has been hidden and nobody talked about it. I never knew that it was important. Once I started getting good at it, I realized you really can kind of see behind people’s masks just by reading body language.”​Direct download link!